Five Below — Local services in Town of Colonie

⭐ Five Below – 131 Colonie Center, Albany, NY ⭐

Friday May 30,2025

Shoutout to Kristina – a Rockstar Training Manager in from Massachusetts 🥰

I want to share my unexpectedly awesome experience at this location, thanks to an incredible employee named Kristina, who was visiting from Massachusetts. She is a training manager, and honestly, Five Below is lucky to have her.

Here’s what happened:

By mistake, I accepted a 19-item DoorDash shop for Five Below—thinking it was a Five Guys 😅.

I dreaded it. My last three Five Below shops at other locations were awful. I’m a professional shopper, and in those stores, items were scattered with no clear layout. It was stressful and time-consuming.

But this time, I called ahead to the Colonie Center location to ask if someone could assist me.

To my surprise, Kristina herself answered the phone. She was kind, calm, and immediately understood my dilemma. When I arrived, she personally guided me through the shop—something she absolutely didn’t have to do. She was beyond helpful and made the experience seamless.

Since DoorDash gave me 30 minutes to complete the shop, Kristina used that time to walk me through the store layout and explain how everything was organized. In just that short window, she gave me more clarity and support than I’ve ever had at any Five Below store.

Five Below corporate: Kristina is a gem. If your company plans to keep partnering with shopping platforms like DoorDash or Shipt, consider putting her in charge of store layout strategy or shopper training resources—because she gets it. And she deserves a raise, too. 🙌

— A grateful DoorDash...

To begin with, I went here on my break to try to buy a drink and there was a decent line. None of the self checkouts were on except one; which two people (including myself) tried to use it since there was nothing indicating that it was "closed". When the cashier saw me trying to check myself out, she stopped her transaction to yell across the room "you can't use that! It's closed!" It wasn't until the second person tried to use it, that again, she stopped in the middle of her transaction to run across the room to throw a closed sign in front of the machine. When I finally reached the front register to checkout, after scanning my item, the cashier then proceeded to quickly turn the pay machine towards herself to give herself a five star review. Once finished, she then turned the machine back to me so that I could pay with my card. The reason I'm giving a two star review instead of a one star is because I've gone to this location in the past and have had much better...

I don’t know which manager but they were rude. I wanted to return something and asked if I could do a return without a reciept (all store policies are different so I always ask) and grabbed a sign of the return policy and shoves it at my face? I was shocked for a moment because seriously, who does that unless I was acting rude first? I asked one question. Anyways I left because she said no (I assumed bc she didn’t talk) and went to another store and accepted the return. So, I’m just going to ignore that...